Mission

It is generally accepted that research in biology today requires both computer and experimental equipment equally well. Information achieved from enormous exhaustive data have greatly contributed to the paradigm shift in biology. Biology or life sciences are no longer restricted to wet-bench experiments. In silico and in vitro / in vivo analyses together will push back the frontiers of life sciences. In particular, researchers in life science must rely on computers to analyze nucleotide sequence data accumulating at a remarkably rapid rate. Actually, this triggered the birth and development of information biology. DDBJ Center is to play a major role in carrying out research in information biology and to run DDBJ operation in the world.

The principal purpose of DDBJ operations is to improve the quality of INSD, as public domains. When researchers make their data open to the public through INSD and commonly shared in world wide, we at DDBJ Center make efforts to describe information on the data as rich as possible, according to the unified rules of INSD, preferably without any stress by using DDBJ.

Nucleotide sequence records organismic evolution more directly than other biological materials and thus is invaluable not only for research in life sciences but also human welfare in general. The database is, so to speak, a common treasure of human beings. With this in mind, we make the database online accessible to anyone in the world.

Major Activities

Construction and Operation of INSDC

In Japan, DDBJ Center internationally contributes as a member of INSDC to collect and to provide nucleotide sequence data with ENA/EBI in Europe and NCBI in USA.

DDBJ Center is officially certified to collect nucleotide sequences from researchers and to issue the internationally recognized accession number to data submitters. The accession number issued for each sequence data is unique on the database and internationally recognized to guarantee the submitter the property of the submitted and published data. Since DDBJ Center exchanges the released data with ENA/EBI and NCBI on a daily basis, the three data centers share virtually the same data at any given time. The virtually unified database is called INSD; International Nucleotide Sequence Database.
DDBJ collects sequence data mainly from Japanese researchers, but of course accepts data and issue the accession numbers to researchers in any other countries. 99% of INSD data from Japanese researchers are submitted through DDBJ.

Management and operation of the National Institute of Genetics Supercomputer System

The National Institute of Genetics Supercomputer System (NIG Supercomputer) is a large-scale computer utilization site with genome analysis as its primary focus. The system provides Supercomputing System Services comprising leading-edge, large-scale cluster-type computers, large-scale memory-sharing computers, and high-capacity, high-speed disk devices.

Providing services to search and to analyze biological data

Biological database management: tools for depositing and retrieving

We provide databases maintained by DDBJ and others through web services or on NIG Supercomputer.
You can collectively download databases from our FTP site.

Providing software tools for analyzing biological data

We provide software tools for data analyses developed by DDBJ and others through web services or on NIG Supercomputer.

Training course and publication

DDBJ holds a training course for bioinformatics,DDBJing (in Japanese), to teach how to submit nucleotide sequence data and how to use our services for analyzing life science data.

DDBJ faculty staff have greatly been reshuffled. DDBJ collaborates with DBCLS more closely.INSDC added a collaborative meeting to deal with huge sequence data produced by the next generation sequencers (Sequence Read Archive) and traces produced by traditional sequencers (Trace Archive).

2012.04

DDBJ, expanding its DNA databank activities, was restructured as one of the Intellectual Infrastructure Project Centers of NIG, being separated from CIB.

2013.10

Collaborating with NBDC; National Bioscience Database Center, DDBJ Center started to operate the archive for all types of individual-level genetic and de-identified phenotypic data from human subjects, JGA; Japanese Genotype-phenotype Archive.